Anjelica Huston

Huston is the third generation of a film family, daughter of the director John Huston and granddaughter of the actor Walter Huston, and she spent years trying not to be in the business at all. Her debut came in her father's A Walk with Love and Death (1969) and she made it reluctantly. She then moved to New York, modelled through the 1970s, and did not commit to acting until she was past thirty.

The commitment paid off almost at once. Prizzi's Honor (1985), directed by her father, won her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and made her the third member of the family to take one. Two further nominations arrived quickly, for Enemies, A Love Story and The Grifters, in which she plays a con artist who has run out of moves and knows it.

Her speciality is women who have already made up their minds. Huston does not play deliberation. She plays a decision taken off screen that will not be revisited, and she can deliver a line of dismissal better than almost anyone alive. Morticia Addams is the popular version, elegant and unbothered and completely in love. The Grand High Witch in The Witches is the terrifying one. Etheline Tenenbaum is the wounded one, and Wes Anderson has used her four times because she can hold a frame without appearing to do anything in it.

She has six Primetime Emmy nominations, a Hollywood Walk of Fame star from 2010, and a late run as The Director in the John Wick films, presiding over a ballet academy with a knife in her voice. It is a good place for her: a small part built entirely on the assumption that everyone in the room is already frightened of her.